Kakei
by teawithmilk
Summary: [2012-verse] The Foot Clan's newest member has just learned how to walk.


So I never ever believed - and I think _Enemy of My Enemy_ proved - that Shredder was a majorly-abusive dick to Karai. Just a little bit misguided with his whole vendetta thing. I mean he trusts her to play with missile launchers! Splinter totally would never trust his kids with missile launchers.

…anyway this is a thing about Shredder and baby Karai and assumes that the whole Miwabomb is real.

Turtles = Nickelodeon.

* * *

—Kakei—

(_lineage_)

* * *

When Miwa took her first steps, she walked with her hands outstretched and her face creased in a big baby smile, her chubby little legs taking her three, four, eight steps across the room until she bumped into his leg and clung there, laughing until he stooped to pick her up, a broad hand under each chubby little arm. The child fell silent, then, her big hazel eyes wide as she looked at him.

"I think she would like to be praised," Kanagawa prompted gently, _fondly _– the child had enchanted half of his guard already.

He had no idea how one would _praise_ a baby, and furthermore, the Foot did not praise idly. Any word he could think of stuck in his throat.

_Tang Shen. What would you say to her?_

He could imagine her, lithe and beautiful, cuddling Miwa close, the child grabbing at fistfuls of long black hair, both of them beaming radiant smiles as they turned to her father to celebrate.

…and _he was not her father_. Even now he could see the taint of the Hamato clan in her face – the nose was already too big, her hair fell in a way that was not that of her mother. But it had been many years since a clan relied solely on its purity – too many had fallen away from the old ways, and there had never been dishonour in adoption.

The child burbled something, flapping her arms and wiggling in his grasp. Kanagawa raised her hands, readjusting his grip under Miwa's arms to something more comfortable for a one-year-old, and gently adding pressure to his elbow until he allowed himself to bring Miwa closer. Seeming satisfied with her new vantage point, Miwa reached out, and patted a hand against his scarred cheek. Something caught in his chest.

"Get out," he said. Kanagawa stepped forward, arms open for Miwa, and he shied away. "Not her. Just you. _Get out_."

As he spoke, Miwa had kept her hand against his cheek, feeling the way the rough, ruined skin had moved and stretched. As Kanagawa left, she brought her other hand up, smushing it against the side of his nose and— what? he could barely see out of his damaged eye — pulling at it as though to try and smooth it, make it match the rest of his face. When it didn't work, she kept patting him, pulling at a face she had never seen this close before, and he allowed it, a breath caught in his chest that he couldn't let go of yet. A paper-thin nail clawed accidentally at the gum in his mouth - her tiny fingers had pulled the corners of his lips up, twisting his face into some grit-toothed parody of a smile.

Then, apparently now bored, she sagged in his arms and kicked her legs, demanding to be put down. Her bottom lip stuck out, and her brow creased as though she could get her own way by sheer force of grumpy-face - _you will need to learn the ways of the Foot, if you think that is going to work_, he thought fondly, then swallowed. He, too, was becoming fond of the child.

The child that was Tang Shen's daughter.

This was all he would ever have left of her. "Kanagawa," he ordered hoarsely, and barely waited for the woman to open the slide door before demanding: "take her to her room."

"_Hai, sensei_."

He turned away, waiting for them to leave. "Does she need anything?"

"_Sensei_?"

"What does she _need_?"

The woman was quiet for a moment, adjusting Miwa comfortably on her hip. "She needs an identity," she settled on. "The police declared her dead several months ago. Hamato Yoshi has left the country."

That particular piece of knowledge had evaded him. Beneath his grief, he found a slow kindling of anger. "Adopt her," he said, turning his back to her and his view towards the window. "Bring her to the clan. Do whatever is necessary."

"_Hai, sensei_." Pause. The child grizzled, and Kanagawa idly pulled her sleeve out of Miwa's mouth. "What about her name?"

"What _about_ her name." Then, it made sense. "Leave it as it is."

Kanagawa bowed her head and left.

He remembered late in the season, when Tang Shen had sat with him one afternoon (she would never hear of his feud; she would not hear it from either of them, even though the feud had long ceased to be just about her). He had brought her tea and a book, and she had shown him the way she (they) planned to write her (their) daughter's name.

_Miwa_.

He would not change that. Not for the world.

-end-


End file.
